I’ve been given the opportunity to do some testing with 2 Nutanix blocks and a Mellanox SX1012 switch for one of our customers, who is looking to do some disruptive changes to the platform they deploy their software onto.

Background

Currently, we partner with this customer to do your typical 3-Tier infrastructure deployments with EMC VNX/VNXe for Storage, Cisco Catalyst and Nexus for switching, Cisco UCS or HP for compute and VMware vSphere for the hypervisor. While this solution has worked very well over the years, when we approached this partner a few years ago with Nutanix, the interest was there but the justification was hard to come by.

Fast forward to this year, we were able to get our partner out to the Nutanix .Next conference for an executive briefing and generate some more internal interest.

To say we were successful is an understatement! By the time we had gotten over our jetlag coming home, it was how fast can we get a POC box onsite to test with. We got a box into their hands, a nice 4 node NX-1050 model, I headed out to California, did the install and gave them the keys and let them start testing – all on Nutanix’s Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV).

Testing went really well, and well here’s the fun story starts. The testing went so well, to take Nutanix to their customer base they needed to validate DR functionality with AHV. Zerto is out for the time being on AHV, so they needed to validate VM failover using AHV.

Nutanix was gracious enough to send us a 2nd POC box – a NX-3050 model, and based on our talks at .Next Mellanox sent us a nice little POC kit, consisting of a SX1012 Half-Width switch, with 12 ports of 40/56GbE and ALL the cables we would need.

So stay tuned, I will be putting together a multi-part story around the standing up of the Lab with 2 Nutanix POC blocks, and using Mellanox as the 10Gbe connectivity for those blocks.